Saturday, November 18, 2017

The Fortress (남한산성/南漢山城) is not the best movie for a brief escape from reality. It can be a rather depressing movie, with a limited number of action sequences, so it may not be that appealing to a modern audience. It may be too dreary even for a Korean audience, but I don't know what the Korean reviews of the movie have been like..

The movie is critical of the hypocrisy of the royal court (and of most officials in general). The pro-democracy sentiment expressed briefly by one of the characters in the movie was perhaps anachronistic, even if we might agree with it. (And it is this sentiment which leads to the small emotional pay-off at the end of the movie.)

Some may think that the characterization of the minister of the interior Choi Myung-kil and the minister of rites Kim Sang-heon is inadequate. I thought the conflict (and limited cooperation) between them was sufficient enough to draw a contrast between the two men. (Does the original novel pay more attention to court intrigue and conflicts between the various officials?) Their different understandings of what duty and loyalty require are the engine of the story. (Is the movie, or novel, an adequate representation of the neo-Confucian mindset, though?)

The movie does raise an important moral question: of the prudence for waging a just defensive war against an invader when the defeat seems more likely than not.

Given the historical circumstances of the story, watching the movie can be a bit of slog, and the character arcs of the two officials may not be enough to keep most people's attention.

The National Catholic Committee on Scouting’s executive committee simply announced it accepted the BSA’s girl membership proposal.

George Sparks, the NCCS’ national chairman, told the Register that the organization did not have an objection to BSA’s proposal to admitting girls into traditional pack and troop units, while maintaining single-gender programming, since the vast majority of Catholic youth-ministry programs are already coed.

Sparks said the BSA wants to have a model of “family scouting” that brings both parents and children into its programs as a family. From the Church’s point of view, packs and troops chartered by Catholic parishes are part of a “youth-ministry program” that allows the parish to minister to people who otherwise do not engage in their other youth programs.

The female is immunized against all dangers: one may call her a thot, roastie, slut, it all runs off her like water off a raincoat. But take off her makeup and you will be astonished at how she recoils, how injured she is, how she suddenly shrinks back: "I've been found out."

Waiting for the first panderingly sincere TOBs-er to say #MakeApp is demeaning to women because it reduces their value to their appearance and that all women deserve to be loved. Count the # of fallacies there--here's a hint: there's one non-sequitur and one fallacy of equivocation.

All women should be loved with agape, but not all women inspire eros, nor should all women be wifed up. As for the objectification of women simply by looking: Men objectify everything -- it is a feature of male psychology and is tied to their being visually-oriented and primarily directed towards the external
world and action. In addition, visual markers of health and fertility are important for male-to-female attraction. Feminists, despite their credentials and "education," simply hate the Other because they don't understand him/them. Unfortunately some of their biggest allies and enablers in this respect are social conservatives.

Are the small Catholic colleges really doing a better job when it comes to fighting cultural Marxism and feminism? The book smarts they deliver may be better than that of the large dechristianized Catholic universities, but it is far from being thorough, and the practice of life that their campus arrangements offer is is deficient. Hard to say who as a group will be the last to take the red pill, but conservative Catholics are certainly in that contest.

If investing and profiting from water rights sounds repugnant to you, then how about speculation on housing? The claim that housing is a fundamental human right, even if it can only be justified partially and conditionally upon the existence of a political-economic system, has more substance to it than the claim that a house is a mere financial asset.